Uncle John’s Impossible Questions & Astounding Answers (8 page)

How did Tina Fey get her scar?

What heavyweight movie star was originally slated to star in
The Blue Lagoon
(1980),
Arthur
(1981),
Night Shift
(1982), and
Three Amigos
(1986)?

If you didn’t know that Tina Fey has a scar on her face, it’s because the star of TV’s
30 Rock
has spent most of her on-screen career trying to hide it—either with makeup or by making sure she’s filmed from her right side only. She got the scar when she was five years old. Fey was playing in her front yard in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, when a stranger walked up and cut the left side of her face with a knife. Then he ran away. At first, Fey thought it was a red pen mark. It wasn’t. Little else is known about the incident—Fey herself never talks about it in public. (Her husband, Jeff Richmond, however, spilled the beans to
Vanity Fair
in 2008.)

John Belushi. His death by drug overdose in 1982 at the age of 33 sent shock waves throughout the entertainment industry that lasted for years. He was cast in or attached to a dozen film roles, so all the projects had to be either scrapped or postponed after his sudden demise. The biggest movie:
Ghostbusters
, in which Belushi was scheduled to play the lead. (The part ultimately went to Bill Murray, but Richard Pryor was also considered.) And yes, before he died, Belushi was considered for the lead role in
The Blue Lagoon
, but the film’s producers realized that the serious tone they were looking for might be jeopardized by the portly Belushi swimming around in a loincloth with Brooke Shields.

What famous 20th-century explorer’s last name translates to “wild duck” in English?

Who is the tallest actor to ever win an Academy Award? Who is the shortest?

In 1940 the Division of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California selected a male model (a student who posed for sculptors) as having the “most nearly perfect male figure.” Who was this dashing young man?

Yuri Gagarin—the Russian cosmonaut, who, on April 12, 1961, became the first human being to go into space. About an hour and a half after Gagarin blasted off on his one-orbit trip around Earth, his
Vostok
capsule re-entered the atmosphere. He ejected and then parachuted down onto a field in a remote region of southern Russia, where a farmer and her daughter saw the strange man in an orange jumpsuit fall out of the sky. As they started to run away, Gagarin shouted, “I am a friend, comrades, a friend!”

The girl turned around and asked, “Can it be that you have come from outer space?”

“As a matter of fact, I have!” Gagarin replied. Then he asked to use a phone so he could call Moscow and get someone to come out and pick him up.

Six-foot-five-inch Tim Robbins is the tallest. He won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for the 2003 drama
Mystic River
. Measuring 3'5", the shortest Oscar winner was Shirley Temple, who won a special Academy Award in 1934 at the age of six. Temple later went into politics, serving as a foreign ambassador for Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, and the first Bush.

That hunky student was Ronald Reagan, who went on to costar with a chimpanzee in
Bedtime for Bonzo
.

1920s silent film star Mae Murray accidentally dropped something…and started a national craze. What did she drop?

Her doughnut. Murray was an early Hollywood sex symbol known as “the girl with the bee-stung lips.” She’s also known as the first person to dunk a doughnut into a cup of coffee. It happened one day in 1925. Murray, who’d recently starred in
The Merry Widow
, was eating in a New York City deli when she accidentally dropped her doughnut into her cup of joe. A hush fell over the table. Murray wasn’t fazed, though. Surprising everyone, she extracted the soggy pastry and
actually took a bite out of it!
Then she raved about how delicious it was.

Word of Murray’s happy accident quickly spread throughout the entertainment community. Over the next few years, anybody who was anybody was dunking their doughnuts. Groucho Marx dunked his in
Duck Soup
. Clark Gable taught Claudette Colbert how to dunk hers in
It Happened One Night
. There was even a “National Dunking Association” with such esteemed members as Red Skelton, Jimmy Durante, Pearl Buck, and a young comedian named Johnny Carson. Dunking doughnuts became such a part of popular culture that it inspired the fast-food chain, Dunkin’ Donuts, which opened its doors in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1950.

Whatever happened to Mae Murray? She’d probably be more popular today had she not angered movie mogul Louis B. Mayer by quitting MGM in 1927. He had her blacklisted from the other studios, and she appeared in only three more films. (Doughnuts, however, appear in millions of coffee cups every day.)

Now we tempt your palate with a few culinary delights, along with a few culinary disasters you wouldn’t feed your dog. First up—two questions about beer
.

Why do German beer steins come with hinged lids?

How many pints in a firkin?

To keep the flies out. In the Middle Ages, Germany experienced several massive fly swarms at the same time Europe was suffering from the “Black Death,” in which millions of people were killed by the bubonic plague. Believing the flies were responsible for the disease, German rulers passed a law that all food and drink containers be fitted with a hinged lid. Although the law didn’t stop the plague—which was actually caused by fleas that hopped from rats to humans—it did mark the beginning of a more sanitary age in Europe. Most food and beverage containers lost their lids after the plague subsided, but lidded German beer steins remained in vogue for three more centuries…and still exist today.